March on May Day: Another Future is Possible!

Without the working class the world doesn’t turn. Without us there’s no public transportation or schools. We transport goods around the world; we care for you in the hospital. We manufacture your clothes, assemble your phones, and grow your food. Yet, we struggle to find dignified and affordable housing. We face depressed wages and our access to social services is dwindling. We live in fear of unjust imprisonment and deportation. We cannot afford to get sick.

In the United States, the Democratic Party won’t deliver us from our on going struggle against systemic and intersectional oppressions. Since 2013, Chicago has closed 50 public schools while laying off unprecedented numbers of teachers and staff,^[1] which disproportionately targeted teachers of color.^[2] The Trump administration’s 2018 federal budget proposes gutting billions from programs like TRiO and HUD to bloat the Defense budget with an additional $50 billion. The Department of Education alone is set to lose $9.2 billion. While we burden our schools with transforming our country’s social ills there has been virtually no change in the achievement gap between black and white students in the last 50 years.^[3] Still, our teachers are overworked and we punish our children with high stakes testing.^[4] Meanwhile, the capitalist class insists, “a college degree is the surest path to the middle class.”^[5] Yet research has proven that education is not a vehicle for economic mobility.^[6] Chicago and the U.S. budget serve as a symbol for the ways in which people in power cannibalize the working class. However, to save our communities, we must not only fight to end capitalism but its international counterpart: imperialism.

 

Time and time again our elected officials clamor for war. On March 17, the United States slaughtered 200 civilians in Mosul, Iraq. But we cannot solely blame the massacre on the Trump administration. How can we when President Obama expanded George W. Bush’s drone war and indiscriminately murdered our brothers and sisters across the Middle East? While the police unleashed water cannons and rubber bullets against the peaceful water protectors in North Dakota Hillary Clinton asked us to listen to each of the parties involved equally: federal government, the pipeline company and contractors, the state of North Dakota, and the tribes.^[7] In reality, there were only two voices: Capital and the Sioux nation, colonizer and colonized.

Our children deserve the chance to grow up safe and healthy—free from violence or economic limitations.^[8] However, this future seems less likely today than ever before. Our homes are being torn apart by gentrification while government assistance programs like TANF only serve to keep families on the brink of economic collapse, rather than facilitate self-determination.^[9]

We are not demanding wealth redistribution. We do not want a system that merely returns what was stolen from us. Capitalism amasses its wealth by exploiting our labor so our liberation must include organizing the workplace at home and abroad. The only revolutionary working class is an international working class. One that transcends race, gender and borders. This is the lesson of May Day and the Martyrs of Haymarket Square. There’s no war but class war. All power to the people.

Love and Revolution,

Fellow Worker Sainfoin

^[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/28/chicago-schools-teacher-layoffs-rahm-emanuel-union

^[2] https://chicagodefender.com/2015/09/02/black-teachers-hit-harder-by-cps-layoffs/

^[3] http://educationnext.org/what-matters-for-student-achievement/

^[4] http://parentsacrossamerica.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Test-Stress-facts-2-1-16rev.pdf

^[5] https://www.gatesnotes.com/Education/What-Makes-a-College-Great

^[6] https://web.stanford.edu/group/scspi/_media/pdf/Reference%20Media/Bowles_Gintis_2002_Education.pdf

^[7] https://indiancountrymedianetwork.com/news/native-news/clinton-campaign-responds-to-dapl-face-off/

^[8] http://www.ascd.org/publications/books/109074/chapters/How-Poverty-Affects-Behavior-and-Academic-Performance.aspx

^[9] https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/02/welfare-reform-bill-hillary-clinton-tanf-poverty-dlc/